When wildfire smoke from huge fires in Canada blanketed the US in the summer of 2023, emergency rooms saw an increase in admissions for lung problems, heart attacks and other health issues.
Burning fossil fuels has driven climate change, and now climate change is costing people their health and increasingly their lives, says a new report from the medical journal The Lancet. The eighth annual Lancet Countdown, an international analysis that tracks nearly 50 different health-focused issues affected by climate change, calls for an immediate wind-down of fossil fuel use.
Those with the least historical responsibility for causing climate change are feeling the worst effects. Pakistan—a country responsible for roughly 0.3% of all climate-change-causing carbon emissions, suffered huge floods in 2022 that displaced more than 30 million people and killed at least 1,700. However, wealthier countries cannot be spared. In the US, wildfire smoke this summer sent people to the emergency room from New York to Georgia. In Europe, a 2022 summer heat wave resulted in over 60,000 deaths.
About one fifth of all US residents work outdoors; the percentages are even higher in many other countries. When it gets too hot, it gets harder and harder to work. Last year, the report says, outdoor workers lost more than 140 hours each — or several weeks of pay — because of the intense heat.
The human and economic costs are forecast to grow with every tenth of a degree hotter the planet gets. Heat-related deaths, for example, could increase by nearly five times by the middle of the century, if without immediate reductions to carbon emissions.
“I have a young patient who presents with uncontrollable asthma. She lives right next to a highway and is breathing in harmful air from cars burning gas,” Renee Salas, a doctor at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health says. “So the treatment she needs is electric vehicles, home weatherization and air purification. These are prescriptions I can’t write.”
【小题1】What can be learned from paragraph 3?| A．The wildfire has burned large areas of forest. | B．Pakistan is largely responsible for climate change. |
| C．Climate change has caused a lot of human deaths. | D．People in wealthier countries have good health care. |
| A．American residents worked very hard last year. |
| B．There is nothing people can do about climate change. |
| C．The economy has also been affected by climate change. |
| D．Heat-related deaths will double by the middle of the century. |
| A．She advocates green lifestyle. | B．She prefers to drive an electric car to work. |
| C．Young people are more likely to get asthma. | D．Hospitals are short of medicines to treat asthma. |
| A．The advantage of living in the US. | B．The cause of climate change. |
| C．The stress of working outdoors. | D．The harm of climate change. |
